


The City that Walks

by R5h



Category: Little Witch Academia
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Not together yet but just you wait, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-01-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:14:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22443913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/R5h/pseuds/R5h
Summary: Diana takes Akko on a very special study date.
Relationships: Diana Cavendish/Atsuko "Akko" Kagari
Comments: 14
Kudos: 114





	The City that Walks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [p4ntry_d3m0n](https://archiveofourown.org/users/p4ntry_d3m0n/gifts).



“Diana, when are you gonna tell me where we're—”

An upraised hand from Diana, who was flying a little ahead of Akko, cut off the question. Now that they were friends— _only_ friends, but hey, she could be patient sometimes—Akko was willing to hold onto her questions.

 _But there were so many questions!_ They buzzed inside her like bees in a burning hive: _where are we going? Why are we doing a study date there? What's so bad about Blytonbury? I mean, I know that one cafe screwed up your tea order that one time but come on, all tea is basically the same anyway, right?_

The scenery was cool, at least: they'd hopped a leyline and popped out deep in the Indian subcontinent, and now they glided through valleys defined by rolling green hills, as the river looped lazily back and forth beneath them. It was in no particular hurry to get where it was going, on this late afternoon.

 _Akko couldn't relate._ “At least tell me how far it is!” she whined.

“Five minutes,” Diana replied back, cool as ever. “Just wait until we get there, Akko.”

Akko _humphed_ , but resigned herself to leaning forward on her broom and thinking very hard about proper broom posture. It wasn't easy—she'd only started _really_ flying about a month before—but she was getting the hang of it, and almost never crashed every time anymore. Focus. _Focus_.

Focus on Diana, the way that her hair danced in the slight turbulence, as if invisible fingers were running through her hair like Akko wanted hers to—

 _No!_ Focus on the _broom_. Focus on good broom posture. Like Diana's perfect posture, ensuring a perfect view of her—

Akko took a hand off the broom handle, raised it to her side, and slapped herself.

“What was that?” Diana said, looking around. “Akko, are you all right?”

Akko had already grabbed her broom again, and was putting on a big beaming smile. “Nothing! I mean, everything's fine!”

Diana nodded and looked back around.

Akko groaned under her breath. It was gonna be a long five minutes.

* * *

Somehow, against all odds, the five minutes managed to pass. Akko and Diana rounded another hill, and Akko saw it: a small town at the end of the valley. Its colorful houses budged up against the edge of a small lake, into which the winding river drained. The late afternoon sun painted the landscape golden.

As the town came into view, Diana nodded and leaned forward, accelerating into a shallow dive. Akko followed suit, albeit with a lot less grace, and within thirty seconds the two of them touched down at the edge of town. “Welcome,” Diana said, “to the town of Amar. The Village that Sleeps.”

“Wow,” Akko said, putting her broom over her shoulder, spinning on her heel to take it all in. “It's full of fairies!”

Fairies of every shape and size and color. Massive molten minotaurs, ten feet tall, shared the street with diminutive ice-goblins no higher than Akko's shin. In turn, there were hardly any two adjacent buildings that shared an architectural style, or even a height: a building to accommodate a ten foot fairy, with a doorway like a cathedral's, would be next to a dozen stacked apartments the size of doghouses. Everywhere Akko looked, there was something new, but—

“Hang on,” Akko said, and she jumped as high as she could a few times to look in the direction of the village's center. “You know what's missing?”

“Ah,” Diana said, a slight smile on her lips. “Very observant, Akko.”

“They don't have a Sorcerer's Stone here,” Akko said, and she knew she was right: the seafoam-green glow was unmissable in any location with an active Stone, and the _lack_ of a glow was just as conspicuous. “But that means....”

“That the city, and all its occupants, were entirely dormant until only a few months ago?” Diana nodded gravely. “Only with magic's return to the world can Amar come back to life.”

“So _we_ brought this place back!” Akko pumped her fist. “Not the village that sleeps any more, huh?”

“But Amar _is_ sleeping. Right now, at least.”

Akko glanced at Diana, but she just had a self-satisfied smile on her face that Akko wanted to—well, once upon a time she'd wanted to wipe that smug look off Diana's face by hand, but now she had very different ideas. In any case, Diana said, “Come with me. We'll want to be seated when it starts.” So Akko followed her through the bustling streets, dodging around the largest fairies and watching her feet to avoid squishing the shortest ones. Trying to hold in her questions.

“We should be right on time,” Diana said, as they reached a cafe. “Table for two, please?” she asked, holding up two fingers for emphasis. The fairy she was talking to, a gnome no taller than half Akko's height, nodded and directed them to a table outside the cafe.

“You know he probably doesn't speak English, right?” Akko hissed.

“That's why I held up two fingers.”

They pulled their chairs out and sat down—though it wasn't as easy as that made it sound. The chairs were surprisingly heavy, and Akko had to pull pretty hard to get hers out. Diana, meanwhile, just magicked hers into position. “So,” Akko said, reaching down to her bag to grab her notes, before remembering that Diana had them. “Thanks again for helping me study....” She frowned. “Um....”

“Magic Runes.”

“I was gonna remember that!”

Diana rolled her eyes.

“But, why here? Like, you know I'm not always the best at concentrating, right? And, like, this?” Akko swept her arm out at all the _everything_ around her—the shapes, the colors, even the noises of fairies speaking in their unique languages. “I feel like this might make concentrating on magic runes kind of hard.”

“On the contrary, Akko.” Diana leaned a little forward onto the table, which—as Akko put her arms down on it—felt similarly heavy to the chairs. “Based on some research I've done, it seems that many people who share your....” She paused, apparently looking for the nicest word possible, before she settled on, “struggles, can find it easier to focus in a visually stimulating environment. As opposed to our usual cafe in Blytonbury.”

Akko frowned. “I mean, now that you mention it....” The cafe was one of Diana's favorites, but it was always so white and clean and tidy, and it was in the quietest and _boringest_ part of town, and Akko always found herself daydreaming instead of working whenever she and Diana went for study dates there. “I guess I never really thought about it. You found this place for me?”

Diana smiled.

“ _Diana_ ,” Akko said, her voice quivering a bit. “That's so _sweet_ of you.”

“Only if it works.” Diana reached into a pocket of her traveling clothes, pulling out several miniature booklets, and tapped them with her wand. “ _Ad magnitudia_.” With a whooshing of air, the objects ballooned like dehydrated foam dinosaurs dropped in water, and within a second both witches' textbooks and notebooks lay on the table. “Let's get started, shall we?”

As Akko pulled her notebook and textbook toward herself, however, the earth shook. “Whoa!” she yelped, grabbing at the table with both hands.

“Try not to mind it,” Diana said, as if that were a reasonable option.

The earth kept shaking. “ _Wha-a-at's ha-a-appeni-i-ing?_ ” Akko yelled, feeling the vibrations through her voice as she stood. She looked around in alarm, but that alarm didn't seem to be shared by anyone else she could see. Fairies kept walking through the streets as if the cobblestones weren't rattling, and even the cafe's waiter didn't seem to care—and he was carrying two trays of tea cups!

“I told you, didn't I?”

Akko's head whipped around to see Diana still seated, her expression serene. “Amar is waking up. Please, Akko, sit down. Tumbling over and getting a head injury would put something on a damper of your ability to study Magic Runes.”

With gritted teeth, in a crouched stance, Akko made her way back to her chair and sat down. Despite all the quaking, neither her chair nor the table seemed to be in any danger of falling over, and neither did any of the houses. “Diana,” she said, as her gut lurched, “are we... moving?”

“Focus, Akko.”

A pair of menus were placed on the table by a passing waiter. Diana nodded politely, then set them to the side. “We'll order in a little while. For now, let's get started on the exercises in the book.” She opened up her textbook to a bookmarked page, and held it toward Akko. “Exercise number ten on this page. The lunar runes to complete this sentence are which of the four choices below?”

Each lunar rune character was made of a column of tiny, glowing green moons in various phases, anywhere from new to full and back again. Unfortunately: “ _They all look the same when they're shaking!_ ”

“Admittedly, yes, but I still believe you can do it. Come on, Akko, this is very simple.”

Akko squinted, and brought the book up to her face, and really _really_ tried to make the shapes look like anything more than blurry green circles. “ _This is hurting my ey-ey-ey-eyes,_ ” she whined, dropping the book and shaking her head like a wet dog.

As she did shake her head, though, she got a glimpse of the scenery around her: not just the village of Amar, but the valley outside. “Diana, those mountains were taller before.”

“No, they're still the same height.” Diana smiled a little. “It's all a matter of perspective, really.”

But the mountains kept falling around them. And as the shaking slowed, but the sensation of movement continued— _upward_ movement, she realized—Akko couldn't ignore that anymore. She leapt from her chair. “Okay, I've _gotta_ see what's going on.”

“Akko,” Diana said, in a somewhat annoyed tone, but Akko wasn't waiting around. She turned and ran back the way she'd come, slaloming around the biggest fairies and leaping over the smaller ones, until she was at the edge of town once more.

And it really was an _edge_ , now. Beyond that edge was open air.

Akko's mouth fell open, and she looked down. The ground she'd landed on from her broom, no more than five minutes ago, was now a hundred feet down and still falling. “We're flying?” she gasped, a second too soon, because then she noticed the _legs_. Vast, trunk-like legs that extended all the way to the ground, legs that were still unbending. Dozens of legs. Maybe a hundred legs.

She clutched at a nearby building for support. “ _Wha_ _t is going on_ ,” she wheezed.

“Say hello to Amar.”

Not letting go of the building, Akko looked around to see Diana approaching her without a bit of surprise in her expression. “Do come back, Akko. We have a fair amount of studying to do.”

“What— _that's_ Amar?” Akko jabbed a finger downward. “I thought the village was Amar!”

“This is the village _of_ Amar. That is to say, Amar's village. What lives beneath the village, that is Amar.” Diana took up a position leaning against the building opposite Akko's handhold. “A fairy the size of a town, who travels from place to place as he pleases. He's only here to drink from the lake, but now he's moving on.”

“ _This is the coolest day of my life._ ”

Diana grinned for just a moment. “That's high praise, coming from you.”

Beneath them, Amar's legs finally finished straightening out, and the city shook again as they stopped rising—like the little jostle of an elevator reaching its floor. Then, as Akko watched, one of the legs stepped outward into the lake. And then another, and another, and another, until dozens of legs were moving at once.

Akko's mouth stayed open wide as she watched. Splashes kicked up from the lake as Amar waded through it, sparkling in the sunlight and creating rainbows. The cumulative noise from the splashes sounded like the wake against a cruise ship, sailing off to parts unknown. A wind picked up against Akko's face—although really the air was still; _she_ was the one moving—and she felt mild tremors with each step.

With a little shout of excitement, she turned around, grabbed a handhold on her building, and started climbing. “Akko!” Diana admonished, but no time for that now. Akko scrambled up the side of this building—and it was one of the buildings designed for a larger fairy, so it was pretty tall—and jumped to her feet at the roof.

Thanks to the additional twenty feet or so of height, the whole valley lay before her. The setting sun painted the lake and river gold, as if giants had been smelting ore and their trail of liquid metal had led here. Gentle shadows dappled the hills, which rose and fell like waves frozen in time. And in the sky she saw a hundred clouds: none were big enough to cover the sun, but each one broke up the monotony of the clear blue behind it with a unique coloration of its own.

It was beyond gorgeous: it was sublime _._ Akko whooped at the horizon, and heard herself echo off the hills a dozen times.

“Akko!”

Akko turned. Diana was hovering beside her on her broom. “Get down from there!” she said. “Someone lives in that house, you know! And we need to study!”

“Oh, uh, right.” Akko unslung her broom from its place on her back, muttered a quick “ _Tia Freyre_ ,” and hovered on it. “But I'm not coming down for a bit!” she said. “It's so pretty up here! Look!”

“It is very nice but we _do_ have a test in a few days—”

“The test can wait!”

Diana sighed. “This town may have been a less excellent study location than I had thought.”

Akko laughed and leaned back on her broom. “Diana, stop worrying about the little stuff for five minutes! We're here, everything's beautiful, just... let things happen!” She reached out, grabbed Diana's sleeve, and tugged gently. Diana acquiesced, and floated a little closer.

For a moment they just watched, Diana hovering close by Akko as the city moved. Their brooms moved with it—the city had been moving when they'd taken off, so they kept the same speed—but all the little vibrations were absent, letting them just glide. It was _wonderful_.

And then Diana pulled away. “We can watch the city walk once we've gotten our work done. Come on, Akko, we'll have tea and everything.”

She tugged at Akko's sleeve in turn, and Akko sighed in defeat. “All right, but I'm gonna hold you to that. I wanna watch this with you.”

“That sounds....” Diana blushed and looked away. “Incredibly charming.”

As Akko floated to the ground, Diana descending next to her, she frowned. Honestly, why wouldn't they want to watch the city moving _now_ , with Amar's hundreds of legs splashing through the lake beneath them?

It was like Diana had something against taking big steps.

“Hey,” Akko whispered, as they touched down and turned back to head for the cafe. “When we get done with studying, I've got something I wanna tell you.”

“Oh?” Diana started walking with Akko beside her. “It's something you can't tell me right now?”

“I guess you'll just have to wait until we get there.”

“Ah, I get it.” A pause. “Akko, stop smirking.”

“ _Never._ ”

Diana sighed an aggrieved sigh. “Trust me,” Akko said, feeling her mind made up, “it'll have been worth the wait.”

**Author's Note:**

> A birthday present for [Pantry-Demon](https://p4ntry-d3m0n.tumblr.com/), and an opportunity for me to write a little worldbuilding/fluff piece. I hope you like it, Pan!


End file.
